The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart

Blue lady orchid

Meaning: Consumed by love

Thelymitra crinita | Western Australia

Perennial spring-flowering orchid. Flowers are intensely blue and form a delicate star shape. Does not need a bushfire to stimulate flowering, but can be smothered by other vegetation, so periodic burns to restrict taller-growing shrubs are beneficial.

That year, leading up to Alice’s eighteenth birthday, Twig saw what no one else at Thornfield did. Night after night she sat in the shadows and watched as the back screen door swept open and Alice, with her long hair streaming behind her, crept across the verandah, down the steps, and into the blooming flower fields under the moonlight. Twig sat smoking long after Alice’s silvered silhouette disappeared into the bush. Although she knew June wanted Alice to be different, to be immune, the truth was on the path that led to the river for anyone to see: Alice was deeply, wildly, blindly in the thick of first love.

The night Alice turned eighteen, after the fancy roast and second helpings of the tiered vanilla lily cake that Candy baked, everyone went to bed tipsy from the crate of Moët that June ordered in specially. Twig sat on the back verandah rolling a smoke, grateful for the silence of the winter stars. Things were changing. You could smell it in the air like a new season. Alice was unsettled. As was Twig over the lies she’d told Alice every time Alice had asked about her family. Although she’d fought against June’s dishonesty, Twig was complicit; she too had kept secrets from Alice for nearly as long as June had.

When the form Twig had filled out and returned to the state adoption services led to nothing, she’d gone back to the Yellow Pages and picked up the phone. She gave the first private investigator to answer her call the name of the woman Agnes noted in her will, and the name of the town where Alice grew up. Not long after Alice had started school the investigator’s report arrived by mail. Twig had to walk all the way to the river before she calmed down enough to read it. Alice’s baby brother was healthy and well, in the care of the woman Agnes instructed should be the guardian of her children if June was not fit or able to raise them. Alice and her brother were living without each other, unaware – were Nina and Johnny the same? Contrary to common belief, Twig knew that not even Thornfield could save a woman from her past. She’d made a good life there, raising Candy, and she’d done her best with Clem. She’d cared for Agnes and the rest of the Flowers, managing the farm and running a good business. But the truth was that no amount of second chances, not even at Thornfield, could change the past, no matter how much June wished it were so. Twig’s relationship with June had never been the same since June came home with only Alice in the truck. I’m the executor of the will, Twig, she’d drunkenly hissed over the years, more times than Twig could count. I made the hard choice that was in everyone’s best interests. Twig hid the investigator’s report and a secret copy of Agnes’s will in the seedling house. She’d waited nine years for the right moment to give them to Alice. Still they stayed hidden, among desert pea seedlings.

When the screen door opened, Twig shrank into the shadows, watching Alice creep into the flower fields, a faint trail of champagne in the air behind her. Alice had drunk flute after flute at dinner. Something was brewing in her life, Twig could sense it as well as any shift in the weather. She counted silently, waiting a whole minute to be sure Alice wouldn’t hear her footsteps, before she hurried down the path to the river, following her.

Oggi was waiting on the riverbank, with a small fire burning by the giant river gum. He’d been especially quiet at dinner. Twig crouched behind a cluster of skinny iron bark trees. Alice flung herself at him as if she’d not seen him for years, their skin painted bronze by the firelight. They kissed tenderly. The look on Oggi’s face at the sight of Alice caused Twig’s eyes to well. She’d loved someone like that once. She remembered how it felt to be so clearly seen by another person, to be so unbroken.

They drew apart and Alice sat leaning against him, cradled in his arms. ‘Tell me the plan again.’

He kissed the top of her head. ‘We meet tomorrow at midnight, right here. We bring one suitcase each. That’s it. We travel light.’ He kissed her temple, her cheek, her neck. ‘We catch the first bus to the city airport, and pick up our tickets. We fly for so long you’ll think we’re never going to land, but we will, in Sofia, where we’ll go to my grandparents’ house, drink rakija, eat shopska salata, sleep off our jet lag, wake up and catch the cable car up Mount Vitosha, to stand on the lake of stones and look out over the world. We’ll walk the goats in the mornings. The bells on their collars sound better than Christmas Day. On the weekends, we’ll take my grandfather’s truck and drive across the border to Greece, where we’ll swim in the sea, and eat olives and grilled cheese.’

‘Oggi,’ Alice whispered dreamily, turning to him. ‘Do you have your pocketknife?’

They carved their names into the trunk of the gum tree, then fell into one another, kissing with the hunger of adolescence. The child who came to Thornfield, so silent, so wrought with horror, was more alive than Twig had ever seen her.

Twig stood silently and shook out the cramps in her legs, then crept back to the path and followed it home. Inside the seedling house, she unearthed the plastic pouch of yellowed papers holding the truth of Alice’s life, then went into the house to wait for Alice to return.

She sat on the couch. Thought about making a coffee. Closed her eyes for just a minute.

It was a regret Twig would carry from that day on, sinking into a sleep so deep that she didn’t hear the floorboards creak when Alice came in.

The next morning, Alice was out running a delivery into town when June came downstairs. Twig was in the kitchen making her mid-morning cuppa and turned to offer June one, but stopped short. June stood in the doorway, Alice’s journal dangling open in one hand.

‘June?’ Twig eyed the journal, its pages filled with the loops and curls of Alice’s handwriting.

June walked slowly out the back. For a while she sat on the verandah staring into the flower field. Twig set a cup of tea down beside her. Cockatoos screeched overhead. June didn’t speak.

For the rest of the morning Twig busied herself with the Flowers, keeping them all out of June’s way. Even Harry gave her a wide berth. Every now and then Twig would glance at June on the back verandah. Whether she’d made her peace with it or not, June had been changed forever by Alice’s arrival as a child. Now Alice was grown, on the cusp of independence, and in love; as June herself knew, there wasn’t much in the world more threatening than a woman who knew her own mind.

It was mid-afternoon when June moved. Twig hovered, expecting June to go to the workshop or get in her truck. Instead she walked inside, into the study, and closed the door behind her. Twig followed and pressed her ear to the door. She could hear June’s voice but couldn’t make out what she was saying. After a long pause, Twig knocked. Once, then again, harder. She tried the doorknob and it twisted open. As she walked in, June hung up the phone. The look on June’s face stopped Twig mid-stride.

‘What have you done?’ Twig asked flatly.

Behind her desk, June turned to look out through the window as Alice’s truck puttered into the driveway. They both watched Alice and Oggi get out of the truck, and come together by the workshop, talking and laughing.

‘What I had to do,’ June replied. A tear rolled down her cheek.

It was years since Twig had seen June cry. The absence of the smell of whisky in the room only caused her more alarm.

June roughly wiped her cheeks and stood. ‘What I had to do,’ she said again. ‘All right, Twig?’ She stood, as if trying to hide something from Twig’s view.

‘What’s going on?’ Twig asked, taking a step forward.

In a fluster, June tried to sweep the stack of letters on her desk into a drawer, but only managed to scatter them across the floor. She swore under her breath. Twig crouched, gathering letter after letter and photo after photo, all of the same little boy. She turned to face June. ‘How could you keep these from her?’ she whispered.

‘Because I know what’s best for her,’ June snapped. ‘I’m her grandmother.’

Twig stood and glared at June, the letters shaking in her fists. Without another word, she threw them at June and left, slamming the door after her. Outside, it was windy. Twig leant against the verandah, taking long, cooling breaths. Alice and Oggi were mucking about by the workshop, teasing each other.

As she watched them, Twig braced her arms over her chest where the wind cut through her clothes. She could feel it in her bones; a northwesterly had blown in.

Alice eased her bedroom door open and stood at the top of the winding staircase, listening. The only sounds in the house were the rhythmic ticking of the grandfather clock and the muffled snores from June’s bedroom. A sudden heaviness weighed on Alice’s body. She remembered the night she arrived, unable to speak and barely able to hold her head up under the weight of sorrow. June had washed her face with a hot facecloth. I’m not going anywhere, she’d said. And that was the truth. She’d always been right there. At the end of a school day, over flowers in the garden, at the head of the dinner table, in the workshop overseeing Alice’s bouquet arrangements. Alice thought of June’s hands, their tough calluses, holding the steering wheel, waving at the gate, ruffling Harry’s ears, holding Alice tight. Too tight.

With one last glance around her room, Alice picked up her suitcase and crept down the stairs as if she were made of the same ghostly vapour as the Thornfield memories from which she was so desperate to disentangle herself.

Alice tiptoed down the hall. Harry’s collar tinkled in the lounge room as he twitched on his bed. She knelt down to kiss his head. Even in slumber he kept her secrets.

Her hands shook as she opened the screen door. She took a deep breath of the fragrant night. When she stepped off the verandah onto the dirt, Alice broke into a run.

The scrub scratched her bare ankles as she stumbled in the dark through the bush. Tears streaked from her eyes, but she pushed on. The night was cold, dry and full of cicada song. Light from the moon cast the world in milky light. Her future glowed ahead of her, an ember waiting to be breathed to life.

Alice reached the river. She put her suitcase down. Wiped her brow. In the moonlight she studied the names etched into the gum tree of the women in her family, who’d sat at that very spot and cast their dreams into the river. She ran her fingers over her own name, and Oggi’s, and smelled the scent of cut wood on her fingertips, remembering when she was a child and first came to the river, thinking she might follow it all the way home. Instead, the river had brought Oggi to her. He was her home now. He was her story.

She arranged herself neatly on the smooth grey rock at the base of the gum and listened for Oggi’s footsteps. Lifted her locket from under the neckline of her shirt. ‘I’m here,’ she whispered, looking at her mother’s face. She wrapped her scarf around her body, and propped herself up against the trunk of the gum tree.

Alice leaned her head back, watching for falling stars.

She waited.

A squawk of galahs woke her. She had a pain in her neck, and her skin was damp. Wincing, she straightened herself, shivering. The river churned in the cold light of morning.

His name sprang to her lips. Alice stood and scrambled over the grey rocks and tree roots by the riverbank. No notes wedged between the stones, nothing tied in the low branches of the tree. Maybe he was waiting for her at the flower farm. A cackle rose from the trees as kookaburras started their early morning chorus. Alice left her suitcase and ran, cutting through the long grass and trees, trying to outrun the pit of fear in her stomach.

When she got back to Thornfield, the Flowers were in their aprons, dotting the fields as they tended to the plants. Alice began to weep. She went up the back steps and into the kitchen. June was standing at the counter, drinking coffee.

‘Morning, love. What can I get you? Toast? Cuppa?’

‘Is he here?’ she asked, her voice breaking.

‘Who?’ June asked calmly.

‘You know who,’ she said, exasperated.

‘Oggi?’ June put her mug down, frowning. ‘Alice,’ she said, coming around the counter to embrace her. ‘Alice, what is it?’

‘Where is he?’ she cried.

‘At home, I expect, getting ready for work as you should be,’ June said, looking Alice up and down in her crumpled dress. ‘What’s going on?’

Alice wrenched herself out of June’s arms, grabbed her keys off the wall hook and ran to her truck.

Panic coiled around her body as she sped through town. She pulled hard left down Oggi’s driveway, her truck fishtailing on the loose dirt track until she lurched to a stop at the house.

On the porch were two chairs, either side of the small table, with a fresh rose in a vase on top, as if any moment Boryana might swing open the door and come out offering a pot of tea.

Alice ran to the front door, expecting it to be locked. It opened without resistance. Inside, nothing was out of the ordinary. No sign of trouble. No evidence of chaos, crisis or any reason that would have stopped him from meeting her at the river. She wandered through the house. It looked lived in and welcoming but something wasn’t right. It was too neat. Or maybe she just didn’t want to admit the deeper truth and most obvious answer. He’d taken Boryana home to Bulgaria; he’d changed his mind and gone without Alice. The wind was hollow as it whistled through the house.

Around the back, the rose garden was resplendent. Alice thought of rose valleys grown from gold and the bones of kings, a sea of petals the colour of fire. She snapped rose heads off their stems and tore them apart, scattering the petals at her feet.

He left without her.

Alice was standing among torn petals when June pulled up. She didn’t feel her knees give out. When she came to she was crumpled on the dirt, cradled in June’s arms. The smell of June’s skin, freshly tilled earth, whisky and peppermints.

‘You fainted, Alice. You’re okay, I’ve got you,’ June soothed.

‘He left without me.’ She began to sob.

June tightened her embrace, rocking back and forth.

The two of them sat that way for a long time, until Alice’s cries quietened to hiccups.

‘Let’s go home.’ June rubbed Alice’s arms gently. Alice nodded.

They helped each other up, dusted themselves off and walked around the house, each to their truck. Alice drove slowly back to Thornfield. June followed at a close distance.

When they got home Alice ran straight upstairs to her room. June let her go. She must be exhausted. June pushed the thought away of Alice waiting all night for Oggi. What was done was done, to keep her granddaughter safe. It was for the best. It was for the best, she repeated more firmly to herself. She opened the screen door and let it sweep shut behind her. It was done. Alice was here. She was in pain, but it was the kind of pain she was young enough to get over. She was safe. She was close enough for June to keep her safe.

June went to the fridge and poured herself a glass of cold soda water. She took a lemon from the chiller drawer and sliced it into wedges, dropping two into her drink. She went quickly to the liquor cabinet and took down the whisky, unscrewed the cap and filled the glass. After stirring it with her pinky she stood at the sink, gulping it down.

Soon Thornfield would be under Alice’s care. That was the next step. A heartbroken young girl was as vulnerable as a timber house without a firebreak in bushfire season; any spark could consume her. Just as June saw Agnes, an orphan, consumed by Clem. And there was Alice, made of them both. When a look crossed Alice’s face that was so like Clem’s, it drove June to her flask before breakfast. Other times her gentle and whimsical nature made it seem as if Agnes had arrived at Thornfield all over again.

June couldn’t bear it. She would not make the same mistake twice; she would not lose her family again. She’d done what was necessary to make sure of that. What Alice needed now was distraction and independence. A sense of worth, purpose and freedom. Which was exactly what June planned on giving her.

Alice dug and cut at the trunk of the river red gum until her wrist ached from the effort. She’d returned to the river every night for a week. The more days that went by without answers, or Oggi himself turning up to deliver them, the more Alice felt cursed by the river and all its secret stories. Starting with the name at the top of the list on the tree trunk, Ruth Stone.

Over the years Alice had learned barely anything about Ruth beyond what Candy told her when she was nine: Ruth Stone brought the language of flowers to Thornfield and grew it from the earth with the Australian native flower seeds her doomed lover gave her. Whenever Alice asked Twig and Candy about Ruth, they told her to ask June, but then when Alice did that, June was evasive. Ruth Stone is how Thornfield has survived, she’d say, or something equally cryptic, like, It’s because of Ruth that you’ll one day own this land. Alice always wanted to retort what a ridiculous thing it was, anyone thinking they owned dirt or trees or flowers or the river. But she’d always been distracted by a more niggling thought. What about my father? she asked June once. Shouldn’t he have taken over Thornfield from you? June didn’t answer.

Even though June had written in Alice’s tenth birthday letter that if Alice found her voice, June would find answers, she never offered to talk about Clem. Or Agnes. Or how they’d got together or why they’d left. Everything Alice pieced together about her parents and what happened between June and her father was through half-truths. She knew her family’s story was buried in the earth from which June grew flowers to say the things that were too hard to speak; if only Alice knew where to dig. Only by pestering the Flowers for hours on end was Alice able to cobble together one simple truth: not even June was immune when it came to fate and love. Both had eaten parts of her life whole, and spat out what remained to make the woman she was today. June’s father died when she was young, and both her lover and their son had left her. Every time June had loved a man it had broken her heart. Alice was bound to June by blood and grief, and now, by the fate of waiting on a promise, only to be left broken by the river.

Alice hacked at the tree trunk with her pocketknife, scratching Oggi’s name from the bark. She cut into the letters of his name, his smile, his good heart and kind nature. When she was done she threw her pocketknife and any stones she could find into the river.

She dropped to the dirt and curled into a ball, sobbing. She would never let love make such a fool of her again.

June watched Alice through the window as she returned from the river. She walked heavily, carrying her sorrow, her face as haggard as when she was nine years old and June had brought her home from the hospital. But at least she was there. June hadn’t lost her.

Alice came in the back door. June busied herself making a cup of tea.

‘June,’ Alice started, but didn’t finish her sentence.

June turned to face her. Opened her arms. Alice studied her, as if she was weighing something up in her mind, before stepping forward into June’s embrace.

While she held her granddaughter in her arms, June thought about her most-loved Thornfield Dictionary entry, Sturt’s desert pea, and its meaning. Have courage, take heart, Ruth Stone had entered in her spidery handwriting. June had learned everything she could about Sturt’s desert pea from her mother, and her books. How fragile and difficult it was to propagate, despite growing wild in some of Australia’s harshest landscapes. But how, under the right conditions, it always came into blazing bloom.

Landscape is destiny

Alice Hoffman